São Paulo built 1.2 million apartments in six decades

Over six decades, the verticalization process in the city of São Paulo led to the construction of 1.2 million apartments and was accentuated between the 1960s and 1970s, when the west zone began to compete with the central region for the homogeneity of the market. real estate.

Until the 1960s, unit launches did not leave the República-Consolação-Bela Vista axis. From 1950 to 1959, 38,000 apartments were built, 72% of them in the central region.

From 1970, the focus of the constructions changed. The beginning of the densification of neighborhoods disputed by construction companies, such as Jardim Paulista, Perdizes, Itaim Bibi, in the west zone, and Vila Mariana, in the south zone, coincided with the city’s first real estate boom.

From one decade to another, the number of new apartments tripled. The city launched 64,100 in the 1960s, against 193,100 in the 1970s. In the 2010s, that number jumped to 262,200.

The numbers are from a survey by Portal Loft, the real estate startup’s platform to disclose sector data inaugurated this month, based on IPTU information. Properties built from 1950 to 2019 were considered.

“The verticalization in São Paulo followed the demand in the regions where the supply of jobs and the development of public transport were concentrated”, says Rodger Campos, data manager at Loft.

“The agglomeration of jobs started in the center, in Praça da Sé, and moved to Avenidas Paulista, Rebouças, Faria Lima and the Pinheiros region. The job market demands space to be allocated and so do families. is verticalization”, says Campos.

Unlike other cities in the world, the densification in São Paulo did not follow an urban plan, and the urban toothpick holder ended up accompanying the construction of subway lines and major avenues.

“The verticalization started towards Avenida Paulista, when it got close to Barra Funda, bumped into industrial warehouses and headed towards Perdizes, Cerqueira César and Consolação”, explains urban planner Kazuo Nakano, professor at the Institute of Cities at Unifesp (Universidade Federal from Sao Paulo).

This is because, explains Nakano, the real estate developer seeks areas where there are more advantages for the buyer to attract profit with greater use of urban land. This intensified in the 1970s, with the implementation of the subway in the city.

“The verticalization process was induced by the subway system with more constructions at the ends of the lines at first, because that was where there were still unoccupied land”, he says.

The relationship between means of transport and housing is foreseen by the PDE (Plano Director Estratégico) of São Paulo, enacted as a municipal law in 2014. The planning of buildings is also governed by the Zoning Law, although the verticalization of the city began well before the laws.

In the process of review, the PDE created incentives for the construction of small units close to urban mobility axes, such as subway stations and bus lanes. The intention was to condense more people in places with easy access to transport as a way to reduce traffic in the city and also reduce the process of sprawling the metropolis.

Loft’s data manager explains that the proximity to these urban microcenters inserted in each neighborhood is one of the main parameters to define the values ​​of real estate, for example. “Prices will be more expensive in the sub-centers, because job offers and transport are anchors for defining pricing”, he says.

Other factors, such as public housing policies, also drove the opening of real estate projects. In the peripheries, mainly in the east zone, the constructions became more frequent from 1990, when the delivery of popular housing complexes of the Cohab (Companhia Metropolitana de Habitação de São Paulo) was consolidated.

In 1995, for example, Cidade Tiradentes took a vertical leap. Cohab’s largest complex is located in the neighborhood, with around 40,000 units. Ten years earlier, it was the turn of Sapopemba and Artur Alvim, according to the study.

The construction of these housing projects, however, left abandoned public land in the surroundings, which were not used. They did not become built-up areas, which favored the emergence of irregular occupations, according to urban planner Nakano.

Between the 1980s and 1990s, the construction of new housing units in the city had the first negative result since 1950, when there was a 2% drop in launches, according to the Loft study.

The survey showed that, more recently, from 2010 onwards, the neighborhood most disputed by construction companies was Vila Andrade, in the south zone, due to the extension of line 5-lilac of the subway.

The first time the neighborhood appeared in the ranking of the ten with the highest number of new properties was in the 1990s, in eighth place. In the following decade, it went to third place, and in 2010 it reached the top of the list, with 12,700 units delivered in ten years.

According to the survey, the list of neighborhoods with the highest number of housing units delivered between the 1950s and 2010 is headed by Itaim Bibi, with 54,400 residential apartments, followed by Vila Mariana (52,800), Jardim Paulista (51.4 thousand), Moema (39.7 thousand) and Perdizes (38.8 thousand).

And why is there no roof?

Despite the intense activity of civil construction in the city, the housing deficit is still a wide-open problem in the metropolis.

as showed the Sheet, the city currently has a deficit of 369 thousand households, according to data from the PMH (Municipal Housing Plan). A study by the economic consultancy Econnit estimates that, by 2030, the problem will worsen, and 73,000 new homes would be needed a year to meet the demand for housing in the capital of São Paulo.

From 2015 to 2019, however, less than 20,000 were delivered per year, according to the Loft survey.

For the startup’s data manager, the chronic housing shortage is a consequence of accelerated demographic growth, which produces bloated cities from the housing point of view. “The city was born somewhere and, from the moment that there was a greater influx of people, a portion was accommodated in slums and invaded areas”, he says.

In the same period in which São Paulo delivered 1.2 million residential apartments, between 1950 and 2019, the city’s population more than tripled: from 3.5 million inhabitants to 11.2 million, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).

The balance between verticalization and housing density, seen by urban planners as the ideal formula for building a fairer city, is still far from being achieved. Nakano says that, currently, the real estate market follows the trend of investing in high-end properties with condominiums similar to clubs that occupy more urban land to inhabit fewer people.

In addition, according to Nakano, in order to continue the expansion process, the real estate market has been heading towards the metropolitan centers, the cities of Greater São Paulo, such as Osasco, Guarulhos and Barueri.

Even during the current economic crisis in the country, the civil construction market remains heated in the city because of the financial market, which is increasingly intertwined with real estate due to investment funds. “It’s the financialization of real estate production and housing,” says Nakano.